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Stem Cells in the Heart?
NewScientist reports that researchers have discovered stem cells in the heart, leading them to believe that the heart can regenerate itself. From the article: "The finding raises the possibility that these cardiac stem cells could one day be manipulated to rebuild tissues damaged by heart disease - still the leading cause of death in the US and UK. Because fully developed heart cells do not divide, experts have believed the organ was unable to regenerate after injury. But, in 2003, researchers at Piero Anversa's laboratory at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, US, discovered stem cells in the hearts of mice, and subsequently humans. However, they still did not know whether these stem cells actually resided in the heart or had merely migrated there from another tissue, such as bone marrow."
Hey, I'm not a stem cell researcher, and I did read the article...
But there was really not much actual science in this article.
Are we talking about adult, embryonic or.. I assume not, but cord blood stem cells.
I assume we are talking about adult stem cells. These have been discovered and are old news. In fact adult stem cells exist in basically any tissue, which includes the heart... So what exactly was the big news story here about?
Does this mean I won't be getting that gorilla heart?
Let me be the first to say I oppose removal of people's hearts to extract stem cells from them.
This was news a few years ago when some folks got an electric pump installed to assist their failing heart, and their OEM heart recovered to the point where the pump was no longer needed.
Fantastic they discovered stems cells, but the heart repairing itself when relieved of load is not news.
(btw, I don't remember the name of the device used when they discovered this, but it was basically a small, simple liquid pump installed next to the heart. They didn't try to mimic a pulse, figuring it was unneccesary. They were right.)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
These pumps are called LVADs, or Left Ventricular Assist Devices, and they have been widely used for years (and continue to be). Here's one site with some pretty general, readable information on them. There are a few varieties (some provide pulsatile flow, like the HeartMate XVE) and some provide axial, non-pulsatile flow (HeartMate II). I don't work for Thoratec, but those are by far the most commonly used ones at my institution. Here is a link to some videos from Thoratec if you're interested. Hope you find this useful.
He was born without an aorta, and has had 20+ surgeries, each time replacing the tubes connecting his heart to the rest of his body with longer ones. If a compatible aorta could be grown just with stem cells, he would have no further need for surgery.
Right now, he is set for a few more years before they have to cut him open again and make adjustments. I hope by then they can just replace the tubes with living tissue and also replace the unsightly scar tissue that has developed from being cut open so many times.
Let's pray to $DEITY that this gets off the ground. I'm pretty sure it will, mindless theologans aside.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
preventing heart atacks.
Curing heart diseases is undoutedly important and necessary, but understanding why and how we have heart diseases could lead to less such diseases in the first place.
The problem - and not only with heart related diseases - is that there are quite a lot of life-style related causes, isn't it so?
And changing behaviours (what you eat, how you exercise, how you relate to your fellow human beings etc) is presently more "difficult" (for cultural reasons) than discovering cell manipulation techniques, that is, than intervening (than making a "patch").
That is the tradition bestowed upon us at least since Francis Bacon: the world, including nature and the human body, are objects which we can manage, alter, change to suit our "needs", to extract profit etc, because we can.
Instead of adopting a humbler attitude towards life, the universe and everything, trying to live seamlessly with our environment and with each others, we learned to alter the world so that it would adapat to our whims. The eventual errors, mistakes and disasters that follow such courses of action are tackled with further and deeper interventions.
Is it possible to change centuries of an intervention tradition, to try to understand and adapt to the environment and others, instead of adapting others and the environment to us?
Am I making any sense?
"their OEM heart"
Wow. I've never actually heard organs referred to as OEM.
Imagine an organ transplant...
"Well, sir, we can pop in this OEM model here, but it's pretty pricey. We do, however, have this third-party Korean heart that we could slap on in there, but it would violate your warranty and, lemme tell ya', those boys in inspections on the other side are unforgiving of that sort of thing. Of course, we could just throw a refurb in there, but those can be hard to come by..."
All in good humor of course, thanks for your informative post
I've always believed that eating the heart of a fallen enemy would give me his courage. Getting his stem cells to boot is a totally unexpected bonus.